According to Snopes.com itâs been going around for more than seven years in one form or another. It claims members of Congress get lavish pensions and also claims they donât pay into Social Security. (They do pay Social Security taxes, as we pointed out in an earlier âAsk FactCheckâ item.)
Fox News has now finished No. 1 in primetime for 10 out of the last 11 weeks, averaging 2.14 million viewers for the week of August 15-21. MSNBC averaged 1.06 million primetime viewers and CNN averaged 746,000. CNN continues to disappoint in August after a tremendous July, finishing the week No. 18 during primetime compared to No. 7 for MSNBC. CNN had beat MSNBC for all of July.
MSNBC was up 3% to 775,000 viewers. And Fox was down 6% to 1.9 million viewers. The true difference between median and mean measurement was seen at HLN, which experienced a 12% increase in mean viewership to 486,000 viewers, largely thanks to a spike in coverage during the Casey Anthony murder trial.